The World Wide Web of the Internet is the most successful distributed application in the history of computing. In the Web environment, client machines effect transactions to Web servers use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is a known application protocol providing users access to files (e.g., text, graphics, images, sound, video, etc.) using a standard page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides basic document formatting and allows the developer to specify "links" to other servers and files. In the Internet paradigm, a network path to a server is identified by a so-called Uniform Resource Locator (URL) having a special syntax for defining a network connection. Use of an HTML-compatible browser (e.g., Netscape Navigator) at a client machine involves specification of a link via the URL. In response, the client makes a request to the server identified in the link and receives in return a document formatted according to HTML.
The Web server is usually a standalone file server that services various Web document requests. Because the server is self-contained, web site administration is cumbersome because access control must be individualized for each device. Although conventional Web servers have some basic administration tools, such as the ability to log transactions and run reports, these tools are not flexible enough to provide the administrator with sufficient information in order to "fine tune" the site. Thus, for example, an administrator certainly will want to know whether a particular Web page was highly active so that the page could be put on a faster server for better site performance. Currently-existing administration tools do not afford sufficient flexibility to manage the server at such a fine level.
The burdens on Internet administrators will grow even more rapidly in volume and complexity as they attempt to manage Distributed File System (DFS) access through their Web servers. DFS is part of a known distributed computing environment, called DCE, that has been implemented using software available from the Open Systems Foundation (OSF). DFS provides many advantages over a standalone file server, such as higher availability of data and resources, the ability to share information throughout a very large-scale system, and protection of information by the robust DCE security mechanism. In particular, DFS makes files highly available through replication, making it possible to access a copy of a file if one of the machines where the file is located goes down. DFS also brings together all of the files stored in various file systems in a global namespace. Multiple servers can export their file system to this namespace. All DFS users, in the meantime, share this namespace, making all DFS files readily available from any DFS client machine.
It would be highly desirable to extend the functionality of existing standalone Web servers in the enterprise environment to take advantage of the scalability, file availability and security features of DFS (or other similar distributed file systems). Before this goal can be achieved, however, it is necessary to provide new techniques and solutions for administration and management of Web server transactions.
This is the problem addressed by the teachings of the present invention.